Red Hat has released a beta version of the latest update to its Enterprise Linux OS, touting significant improvements to the desktop and virtualisation.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is becoming increasingly popular and is one of the most commonly deployed open source distributions in businesses, along with Novell's SUSE. …

poor docs/flaky tools

It's not RHEL!

Red Hat are quite annoyed by people calling it RHEL, even though that's what everyone calls it.

I'd also suggest it's not getting any more popular with Linux, it's was one of the first popular Linux distros and as more enter the market it's getting less popular within Linux as there are more distros every year. It is probably getting more market share in the non Linux market as it eats into Unix and to a lesser extent Windows markets.

@AC flaky

To Err...

It's always newbies just out of nappies who shout RTFM loudest.

Incidentally error 18 is usually caused by formatting your disk with the boot partition in the wrong location. It needs to be the first partition. For a more technical (and accurate) explanation search your distro's forums.

Free?

RHEL is free... that's why CentOS/StartCom are possible. The thing that costs money is the support, and noone expects to get that for free. And you can't reuse the Red hat trademarks in derivative products I suppose.

Grub 18?

Google it, n00b - the first five or six hits on google all have the same info - you need to shift your partitions around so that the /boot is at the start of the disk, or you can modify the partition table info thingy so that it looks at the right area first, or something. it certainly doesn't look too tricky.

Also, if it was taking hours to install, I'd strongly suggest your hard disk is shafted, and beyond that it could be your BIOS is a bit dodgily set up - Grub18 suggests that too, but it's more likely the HD was knackered - that happens far more often IME.

You can get a similar problem on HP DC desktops if you image them using WDS after a user has booted into the OEM install of XP - it writes a hidden partition which messes the master boot record up and says that a partition is encroaching on the recovery partition and it can't continue.

Amazing what you can do with a bit of logic. Before I worked that out, people were replacing hard drives - on pretty much new machines!

I think Ubuntu took about 20mins to throw onto my Tecra A2 - hardly a rocketship, but it runs sweet on it, better than XP, which for wanking/banking is all I care about really.

Pretty much off topic, but meh, what can I say, I hate to see stupid people giving up on something that might be of use to them - I'm not beardy *nix pimper, but I'm quite liking Ubuntu for doing what it does, it's working well, and it's taught me a few new skills [like not trying rm -rf as root for fun. woopsy!] - really can't complain.

RHEL/CentOS

We use RHEL on our public facing production servers but our dev boxes are running the equivalent version of CentOS which gives us the luxury of developing and deploying on systems with very negligible version and config differences whilst still enjoying the benefits of vendor support where it's needed.

Save yourself the headache.

I have been using SLES in the datacenter for years, just recently I was lured into purchasing some RHEL 5.1 because of some of the offerings promised by RHX. (Red Hat Exchange) I can honestly say Red Hat has been the worst crap-ass company I have ever had the displeasure of giving any money to. For the "largest" commercial linux vendor I was utterly astonished at what a huge group of clueless wankers the lot of them were. The sales process was shady and vexing, once I bought my software, I couldn't get it. RHN said it was RHX's fault and vice versa. When I finally recieved the actual OS provision and got the OS, I couldnt get my RHX packages, when I called them to use my "support" I had purchased, they told me it was almost 5:00 at the office and everyone had gone home, and besides that, no one knew of or had ever even heard of the package I had purchased (JasperServer). After being transferred to the janitor at RH, I finally discovered the JasperServer package, for which I HAD ALREADY PAID FOR, didn't actually exist yet, but some fellow was going to get around to that maybe next week or so. When that did happen, it turns out it was for 32-bit ONLY, and I would have to wait again for them to make a 64-bit package. When I did get the JasperServer software it came distributed with JBoss as the application server, and turns out their deployment of it on JBoss was utterly fscked, once again I called on my "support" contract, and they told me I didnt have a JBoss contract. Not to mention they have never heard of EVMS, have no packages for it, and charge you ad-hoc for components that every distro in the known universe comes with (eg; Heartbeat, yeah thats the "additional" clustering license) I wiped my 2 RHEL installs and put SLES back on despite having flushed tens of thousands down the toilet and will NEVER buy anything from those turd nabbers again.

@Save yourself the headache

Somehow, somewhere, everyone will have a horror story regarding every distro and every OS, including their support regimes. Over the last 20 years, the only company I remember that impressed me with their support was Central Point Anti-Virus, and that was a long time ago! The majority opinion in most knowledgeable circles is that RH is pretty good, so perhaps you got the new employee on his/her first day?

Personally, I use CentOS (in 5.1 form at the moment) and that seems pretty good to me.

a free(beer & speech) RHEL is available

...it's called scientific Linux. The physicists at CERN and Fermilab got pissed off paying for RHEL a while back and now recompile it from source with their own branding.

...I really wouldn't recommend it for the average user though, all the power is under the hood and at the command line (there are some fantastic tools). KDE and gnome are so old and out of date on RHEL. An average user should use (you guessed it) ubuntu.

Different Flavors.

what's the problem? Every Os has its limitations. Saying so, I do think there is always the need for change. But changing to a Cr--p OS would not make life easier, would it?

For some reason, i decided to test the Oracle Enterprise Linux a few days ago as compared to another option I had the Sled 10 Linux Enterpirise Desktop. The Sled 10 took a couple of minutes to install.

But notwithstanding is got a lot of features that would not go for free in MS Os..

@paul

I'm not saying RHEL is bad or loosing share relative to all operating systems, but I think it's losing market share within Linux, as more distros come to the market.

Once upon a time Red Hat was without a doubt the dominant Linux distro, but over time others have come along to compete. There is now CentOS, Oracle et al if you want a pure Red Hat clone and then there are a whole host of non Red Hat distros.

Virtually no one runs Red Hat at home any more and SMEs are looking at CentOS or Ubuntu or Novell.

I'm sure in absolute terms Red Hat sales are going up and up, it's just that the Linux market is expanding even more.

Not all that flaky...

...and I concur with the already voiced estimate that an hours-long install run on most Linux distributions is likely due to hardware problems and a bolluxed (love that word, thanks Reg!) HD partitioning.

Then again, no distribution is without its quirks, and I must say that RHEL is unbeloved by me because it seems to have a lot of them; certainly more problems than I have with other distributions.

Thirdly, of course, if you want a HUGE lot of quirks, use Windows, where nothing really works the way it should and the programmers seem to assume all users suffer from Alzheimer's, hence remind me that I just put a CD in the drive.

OSS?

'The physicists at CERN and Fermilab got pissed off paying for RHEL a while back and now recompile it from source with their own branding'

Which is why the OSS model is not a money generator and therefore useless to base a software business on. Got the source, compile it yourself, pay the company who wrote it no money unless you need support and only then if you desperately need help as the support costs are steep.